I’ve seen this argument somewhere before

Except, of course, there is a possibility that the Cannibal Rat Ship exists, and there are at least verifiable records that a ship called the Lyubov Orlova once existed. The theologians don’t even have that much of a glimmering of likelihood.

Big ships leak. They have bilge pumps for a reason and the older the ship the more the leaks. The engines are water cooled with sea water and the drive shaft has seals to prevent water coming in but in a non maintained older ship those systems leak water and that is what the pumps are for. And it rains.

Now some ships without power might stay afloat for 10 years considering how slow the leak might be but this ship was on its way to the junk heap. The likelihood that it is still afloat with no power to run the bilge pumps in over a year would be close to zero.

then I see the likelihood of the ship slowly filling with water and the size of the area of the sea the ship was drifting in made it OK to just let it drift unobserved. That seems a rather primitive and crude response to the problem of a ship past its usefulness to me.
uncle frogy

Silly thing that arbitrarily comes to mind. Family decides to go boating. I don’t remember the whole string of bad luck, but they were having a hard time right from the start. They put the boat in the water, and it’s leaking. One family member was recording the whole thing with his camcorder and zoomed in on a rat who emerged from the boat’s interior and jumped onto the pier. He declares that they should just go home before they all end up dead or something.

froggy, AIUI, the ship was being towed, but the tow line broke in a storm, and being a storm and all, trying to follow and recapture the ship was simply impossible; that’s why it was left adrift, and why it was then lost. There wasn’t a conscious decision to leave it adrift, it just kinda happened.

And as markmckee said, the chance of it still being afloat is close to zero. (And if it was still afloat, wouldn’t someone’s aerial or satellite recon have seen it by now?

As for those “cannibal rats,” they’re probably not eating each other because of some new virulent plague that will cause a Zombie Apocalypse if they get ashore; they’re eating each other because that’s all they have. They’d probably all have to be gassed or something anyway (if there’s still a ship to gas), but it’s not a Species Extinction Event.

“Do you like the ship? My grandmother had a ship. Nothing to boast of. You could walk around it in an hour, but still it was, it was a paradise for us. One summer, we went for a visit and discovered the place had been infested with rats. They’d come on a fishing boat and gorged themselves on coconut. So how do you get rats off a ship? Hmm? My grandmother showed me… You just leave it and they begin to get hungry. And one by one… they start eating each other until there are only two left. The two survivors… but now they don’t eat coconut anymore. Now, they only eat rat. You have changed their nature. The two survivors. This is what Lyubov Orlova made us.”

Cannibal rat ship sounds a lot like the NSA: A out-of-control hunk lurching about with a tendency to wreck anything it crashes into, a lesson in what happens without oversight, and in desperate need of sinking with very little worth salvaging. The rates, however, are probably smarter.